Snowman

Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s ‘Snowman’ in The Museum Of Modern Art sculpture garden. ‘Snowman’ (2016) is an updated version of a 1987 site-specific work by Fischli and Weiss that was commissioned by a German thermic power plant whose energy―in the form of heat, paradoxically―was used to keep the snowman perpetually frozen. Though a snowman is, as Fischli observes, a “sculpture that almost anyone can make” simply by rolling three spheres of snow and setting them atop one another, Fischli and Weiss’s ‘Snowman’ is dependent on a technically complex apparatus for its year-round subsistence. Over the course of three decades of collaboration, Fischli and Weiss explored and exploited contradictions such as this one and investigated the extraordinary potential of ordinary objects and situations. ‘Snowman’ takes on new associations in the setting of MoMA’s Sculpture Garden and in the company of works that span the last century, by artists from Henri Matisse and Aristide Maillol to Tony Smith and Katharina Fritsch. Together, ‘Snowman’ and its companions testify to the expansive possibilities for sculpture today, and to the role of museums in nurturing and preserving their collections.”

– MoMA

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